I've
been on holiday in the Scottish Highlands. Like many other areas
of the UK, the terrestrial television network there has countless
low-powered transmitters, some serving only a few hundred houses.
Some of these transmitters are at the end of a very long retransmission
chain, and it shows.

We spent some time at Uig, on Skye. Uig's
local transmitter receives from Skriaig, and I guess this reception
must be fairly marginal, because the picture quality leaves much
to be desired. BBC-1 in particular had that strange, indefinable
mushy quality that you sometimes see at the end of an over-extended
analogue cable TV system, and it was a while before I realised
that the occasional impulse interference came from motorbikes
not near me but near to the transmitter site - the receiving aerial
being at the side of the main road into the town.

I don't usually
bother with satellite TV in the motorhome, but after the first
evening I threw in the towel with terrestrial and set the dish
up. The difference was staggering, and it set me thinking. The
enormously costly and complex analogue terrestrial network provides
reception - sometimes less than perfect reception - of only five channels
(four in the Highlands!). Looking at the houses in Uig the anachronistic
nature of terrestrial transmission - analogue or digital - really
strikes home, because the majority of them sport a Sky dish. Will
there really be any point in re-engineering a network of over
a thousand transmitters for terrestrial digital, when satellite
provides a technically superior alternative?

I've
heard that the main official justification for maintaining the
terrestrial network is national security. It's thought that an
enemy might zap the satellite and prevent HM Government from addressing
us all in time of war. I wonder if this concern will be quietly
forgotten when the time comes for the analogue switch-off in the
more rural areas. I guess it will be much cheaper, in 2008 or
whenever the time comes, to buy any remaining satellite refuseniks
in Uig a dish and basic set top box than to re-engineer the repeater
station. Perhaps in the future we will have perhaps a hundred
rather than a thousand TV transmitters in the UK. Would this be
yet another retreat for public service broadcasting, or merely
the logical and cost-effective use of new technology?